Sobibor

'This is a remarkable book by a remarkable author. Jules Schelvis was himself a survivor of several Nazi camps, including a short stay of a few hours in Sobibor. After his retirement, he made it his mission to write the first detailed and scholarly book about this camp. His motivation was without doubt very personal and very emotional, as his young wife and her family were murdered in Sobibor. In spite of that (or maybe because of it) his research was scrupulously undertaken and his finished text is marked out by its precision and scholarly distance. This book is both an excellent historical study and also a monument to the events it examines.' Professor Hans Blom, University of Amsterdam, and Director, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation 'Every historian is motivated by the urge to leave not one stone unturned. This is especially true for Jules Schelvis, who, after many years of archival research, managed to uncover the sinister facts of the extermination camp of Sobibor, dug up from the forgotten past.' NRC Handelsblad 'This is one of the very few books that deals with what made the Nazi genocide of the Jews unprecedented: the death camp in which Jews were killed on an assembly-line basis, as Raul Hilberg has put it. Three of these camps have existed, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Belzec and Treblinka are relatively well known. In this magnificent study, the survivor and self-trained historian Jules Schelvis has written the history of an isolated place in Eastern Poland, Sobibor, close to the borders with Byelorussia and Ukraine, where 170,000 Jews who had lived in Poland, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Germany, the Soviet Union, Austria and France were murdered in 1942-43 - the most of them upon arrival. Nowadays there is a monument in Treblinka, which dates from the Stalinist period. And there is a museum in Belzec, which was built more recently. In Sobibor there is practically nothing, except a railway track and an abandoned nursery with some photographs in it. So, this book literally is all there is about the death of 170,000 humans.' Professor Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Amsterdam